Research & Development
Team
Dr William Skirving - ReefSense Director and Lead Scientist
Dr Skirving has a BSc majoring in Geography and Mathematics, a BSc (Hons) in Climatology and Remote Sensing, an MSc in Hydrology and a PhD in Physics specializing in Environmental Remote Sensing. He spent 3 years teaching geography at James Cook University before moving to the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), where he was the head of Remote Sensing for 15 years. Towards the end of his time at AIMS, Dr Skirving was seconded to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Washington DC, where he worked for 3 years. Upon returning to Australia, Dr Skirving resigned from AIMS and set up ReefSense Pty Ltd. As well as being the director of ReefSense, Dr Skirving is a Senior Scientist within the NOAA Coral Reef Watch program.
Dr Skirving has published over 150 peer reviewed articles in journals that include Nature, Nature Climate Change, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Global Change Biology, Coral Reefs, PloS One, Remote Sensing, Remote Sensing of Environment, Geophysical Research Letters, Limnology and Oceanography and others. His publications have totaled more than 13,000 citations.
Best described as a satellite oceanographer, Dr Skirving specialises in monitoring the effects of climate change on corals using environmental parameters derived from satellite data. While at AIMS, he gained extensive experience in the use of many remote sensing instruments including visible and thermal infrared sensors, scatterometers and altimeters as well as the deployment and use of relevant in situ instruments (e.g. wave staffs, wave-capable Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers, tide gauges, temperature and salinity sensors, etc). Dr Skirving was also a major contributor to Chapter 30 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th Assessment.
Dr Skirving has served on more than a dozen International and National expert committees including the GMS Pathfinder Working Group (Co-led by NASA and the Australian BoM), a sub-group (mini SAG) of the ESA Science Advisory Group to the ATSR-2 and AATSR missions, the Integrated Global Observing Strategy (IGOS) Coral Sub-theme, the Environment Facility’s (GEF) international Targeted Research Project on Coral Reefs and Climate Change Remote Sensing working group, and is currently the co-lead to the international Group on High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) Coral Heat Stress Task Team.
Dr Skirving has extensive experience in organising, running and participating in scientific and user outreach workshops for the various projects he has worked on. These workshops have been conducted all over the world, but mostly within the Pacific, Caribbean islands and around Australia.
Dr Blake Spady - Research Scientist
Dr Blake Spady acquired his BSc in Biology from George Mason University, Virginia, USA. Both his MSc (completed, 2013) and PhD (completed, 2018) research were supervised by Prof Philip Munday and Dr Sue-Ann Watson at James Cook University (JCU) in Queensland, Australia. His postgraduate research focused on species-specific effects of climate change, with an emphasis on ocean acidification, on the physiology and behaviour of marine invertebrates. This work led to expertise in experimental biology, carbonate chemistry analyses, statistical analyses, programming, respirometry, marine animal husbandry, aquaculture system design and maintenance, an abundance of field skills, and much more.
From 2015 to 2020, Dr Spady was a returning guest lecturer for several postgraduate-level courses, and was a tutor for entry level science courses and practicals at JCU. He was also involved in the Range Extension Database and Mapping Project (REDMAP) from 2017 to 2020 as the regional coordinator for Queensland. REDMAP is a citizen science initiative aimed at tracking the range shifts of marine organisms within Australian waters. Dr Spady’s role in REDMAP involved data compilation and analysis, outreach and communication with stakeholders, and administrative duties. He also secured a $30,000 AUD grant for the program through the Queensland Citizen Science Grant. In 2019, Dr Spady worked as a research assistant for Dr Sue-Ann Watson, as well as a research aquaria technician at JCU. Dr Spady has also been the advisor for multiple MSc and Honours research projects, a role that has been one of his most rewarding experiences in science thus far.
Currently, Dr Spady works as a researcher, programmer, and product developer for ReefSense Pty Ltd, and as part of that role, he is a member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch program and is an adjunct within the College of Science and Engineering at James Cook University. Here he is the lead on the Thermal History product and the Coral Disease Outbreak Risk product. He also maintains the Global Coral Bleaching Database, which is one of the world’s most extensive collections of quantitative observations of coral bleaching and mortality. Additionally, he is involved in the development of many of NOAA Coral Reef Watch’s products and enjoys continued collaborative relationships between NOAA and researchers/managers across the globe.
Andrew Norris - IT Specialist and Software Engineer
Andrew Norris is the ReefSense IT Specialist and Software Engineer, and as such is a full time member of the NOAA Coral Reef Watch team. He is an exceptional software engineer with a wide range of experience in computer hardware, system administration and programming, including:
Hardware
-
Building and repairing computers
-
Desktop computers and microcontrollers
System Administration
-
Maintain Linux and BSD Unix computers
-
HTTP and e-Mail servers
-
Physical computers and cloud servers
-
XML processing with XSLT and XQuery.
Programming
-
Systems and Application programming
-
Designed and coded application programs as well as filters and other low level system related utilities.
-
Accounts Payable / Accounts Receivable.
-
Satellite data ingesting, analysis and visualisation.
-
-
30 years’ experience programming in C and C++
-
Platforms
-
macOS
-
iOS
-
Linux
-
Windows
-
-
Programming Languages:
-
C, C++ and Objective C/C++ programming Languages.
-
Python Programming Language.
-
Swift Programming Language.
-
Common Lisp and Scheme.
-
Octave / MATLAB.
-
Mathematica.
-
Ruby Programming Language.
-
JavaScript – Client and Server
-
Smalltalk OOP Computing Environment.
-
The Java programming language.
-
Currently learning the Julia Programming Language.
-
Andrew’s recent activities include assisting with the development of a number of the NOAA Coral Reef Watch products, including the version 4.0 heat stress product suite, Marine Heatwave Watch product, and the Light Stress Damage (LSD) product. He has also assisted research projects being conducted by the Coral Reef Watch team. (e.g. downscaling of HadISST data for use with the derivation of new pre-mass bleaching era heat stress climatologies, and investigations into the performance of physical retrieval and regression-based satellite SST retrieval algorithms over coral reefs.
Cathy McDonald - Intern
Cathy McDonald is currently studying for her Medical Laboratory Science Degree at James Cook University. She has been working as an intern with ReefSense since 2021 and has acquired a number of very useful skills in the use of GIS, Origin plotting and Excel spreadsheet usage.
Cathy works full time for ReefSense during her University holidays. Currently her work at ReefSense involves keeping the global bleaching database up to date and assisting scientists with data analyses and the production of diagrams for various projects and publications.
She was a significant contributor to a paper published in F1000Research:
Unprecedented early-summer heat stress and forecast of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, 2021-2022. Blake L Spady, William J Skirving, Gang Liu, Jacqueline L De La Cour, Cathy J McDonald, Derek P Manzello. F1000Research, 2022, 11:127.